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Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there.
After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.ion.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He has done workshops for men with the late James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work.
Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures. Bly's ooks of poetry include What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? Collected Prose Poems and Meditations on the Insatiable Soul, both published by Harper Collins. His second large prose book, The Sibling Society, published by Addison-Wesley in hardcover and Vintage in paperback, is the subject of nation-wide discussion. His collection, Morning Poems (Harper Collins), named for William Stafford’s practice of writing a poem each morning, revisits the western Minnesota farm country of Bly’s boyhood with marvelous wit and warmth.
He has also published The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (Henry Holt) in collaboration with Marion Woodman. His selected poems, Eating the Honey of Words, have been published from Harper Flamingo, as well as his translations of Ghalib, The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib (with Sunil Dutta) from Ecco Press. He has also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner).
In 2000 he won the McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award. A book of ghazals, The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, was published by HarperCollins, 2001, and his selected translations, The Winged Energy of Delight, appeared from HarperCollins in 2004. In 2005 HarperCollins published his second book of ghazals, My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. In 2008, the Guthrie Theatre staged his translation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. Recently, White Pine Press has published a new selection of his prose poems, Reaching Out to the World. Bly's latest collection of poems is Talking into the Ear of a Donkey.
Robert Bly

Loving a Woman in Two Worlds with Robert Bly
10.00
In his numerous roles as groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called "the expressive men's movement," Bly remains one of the most hotly debated American artists of the past half century. In this new collection of poems, the National Book Award-winning poet explores the meaning of mature love in a sustai...

Sibling Society Workshop with Marion Woodman and Robert Bly
19.95
Where have all the grownups gone? In answering that question with the same freewheeling erudition and intuitive brilliance that made Iron John a national bestseller, poet, storyteller and translator Robert Bly tells us that we live in a "sibling society, " in which adults have regressed into adolescence and adolescents refuse to grow up. We are ...

An Evening with Marion Woodman & Robert Bly on The Maiden King
7.00 10.95
The author of "Iron John," together with an eminent psychotherapist, reunite the Masculine and the Feminine. Robert Bly and Marion Woodman interpret the deep psychological insights imbedded in ancient stories, in this instance a Russian folktale about bringing feminine energy back into the world. The Maiden King tells of an absent father, a pos...

An Evening with Marion Woodman & Robert Bly on The Sibling Society
10.95
Where have all the grownups gone? In answering that question with the same freewheeling erudition and intuitive brilliance that made Iron John a national bestseller, poet, storyteller and translator Robert Bly tells us that we live in a "sibling society, " in which adults have regressed into adolescence and adolescents refuse to grow up. We are...

Openings and Limitations by Robert Bly
10.95
In his numerous roles as groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called "the expressive men's movement," Bly remains one of the most hotly debated American artists of the past half century. What is it about Bly and his ideas that inspires such impassioned responses from readers and associates? The psycholo...

Men and the Wound by Robert Bly
10.95
An American poet, essayist, activist, and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. Men and the Wound: In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing m...

The Naive Male by Robert Bly
10.95
When a woman or a father attacks a naive male, he immediatelyopens himself up and takes the attack right into himself."Oh, yes, that is true. I am really bad!" It does not occur tohim that the attack may be something quite different. Maybe thewoman or father is angry at something else and is displacing or projectingthe anger onto the man. Th...

A Home in Dark Grass by Robert Bly
10.95
A poet, translator and social theorist, Bly has published more than 30 collections of poetry, including The Light Around the Body (1967), which won a National Book Award, and most recently Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected Poems (2013). His honors include fellowships from Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment ...
W.B. Yeats and His Father: The Development of Personality In Men by Robert Bly

W.B. Yeats and His Father: The Development of Personality In Men by Robert Bly
21.95 39.95
Robert Bly, best-selling author of Iron John and winner of The National Book Award for Poetry has been a cultural icon for many years. Twenty Five years ago Robert gave a weekend workshop in Pennsylvania, the result was a phenomenal program in which Robert explored two of his favorite subjects - W.B. Yeats and the psychology and personality of m...

A Living Friend with Robert Bly and Coleman Barks
9.95
Robert Bly is in beautiful form, reading seven of his own poems from Stealing Sugar from the Castle and Coleman Barks reads some segments from the Shams Tabriz Sayings, as well as Rumi poems. Tracks include: 1-Snowbanks North of the House, 2-Four Poems From Stealing Sugar From the Castle, 3-Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat, 4-Sayings of Shams Tabr...

Where Have All the Parents Gone with Robert Bly
9.95
Robert Bly looks beyond the individual psyche to the problems of our public life, explaining why we as a culture are so adrift. What he finds is an infantilized society in which the battle between youth and age has been won by youth. Bly argues that in the collapse of the old patriarchal world-view, we are becoming a world of "siblings" who do ...

Men and Women Talking Together: Deborah Tannen and Robert Bly
0.00 11.98
This discussion between best-selling authors Deborah Tannen (You Just Don't Understand) and Robert Bly (Iron John) is presented as a sort of continuing education program. It is utterly delightful. The authors are both funny and serious. They care a great deal about the topic of women and men's conversational styles. The production is so well do...

What Stories Do We Need? with Robert Bly
9.95 12.95
Robert Bly poet, storyteller and mythologist takes us on an imaginative and disturbing journey in this live recording. Disturbing both personally and historically, the commentary reminds us that the mythology we have inherited is often defective. One story reports that the very moment we are born a snake appears wBetterListen!ith us which the do...

Poems of Rumi by Coleman Barks and Robert Bly
9.95
We are delighted to offer this excerpt from The Poems of Rumi as read by Coleman Barks, leading scholar and translator of Rumi poetry, and Robert Bly, poet, author, and leader of the men's movement. Jalaluddin Rumi is a beloved as a spiritual master and one of the greatest poets of all time. "The dictionaries have no entry for the sort of love...

The Human Shadow by Robert Bly
10.99
Through poetry, music and storytelling, Robert Bly takes us on a thought provoking and entertaining journey captured by this extraordinary live audio program recorded at the Open Center in New York City. Bly says parents make it clear there are certain parts of us they don’t like, ’you’re too noisy’ … One image is to say we take that part and pu...

Educated Heart by Robert Bly, The
0.00 9.95
During this talk, Iron John author Robert Bly gives a delicate and lively view of the fantastic flowering of feeling in 12th Century Provence. The feeling thought, developed from Arabic, Gnostic, and Albigensian sources, blossoms as love poetry famous at that time. In this recording, Bly distinguishes between the literal mode, the psychological ...